Routines and Conversations

Whatever their role, office workers are involved in two types of activities: either they are doing some task on a predefined routine, or they are inter-acting with each-other (communicating) to deal with an exceptional situation, i.e., they have to solve a problem they or their colleagues have encountered. Traditional office computer-based tools and systems aimed to support routine work, while emerging CSCW tools and/or groupware systems aim, on the contrary, to support human cooperation toward a common objective. Workflow management systems are the first tools facing the problem of offering an integrated support to routine and non-routine work, when they provide their user with some exception handling mechanisms. Two different lines have been followed in this respect: either a communication support system is embedded within a workflow management system, or a workflow management system is embedded within a communication support system. In the first case, the communication support system is generally restricting the communication possibility on the basis of the procedure definition, while, in the second one, the procedure definition can appear more complicated on the assumption that any task results from an inter-action between a client and a performer. In this paper we present a different solution to the problem, which allows a user to switch from a workflow management system to a communication support system within a common framework, in such a way that the communication support system appears as a generalized exception handling mechanism.